Australian Agrifood Data Exchange Phase 2: Experiment 4 - Traceability

Summary

The Australian Agrifood Data Exchange is a multi-stakeholder project that aims to address the significant issue for agricultural industries and government, where although the use of data and analytics is becoming more widespread, the sectors are held back by the lack of a consolidated data exchange that combines multiple data sets from multiple data sources in real time. This program looked to address challenges for industry while also collaborating with the Research, Industry, Commercial and Government sectors to leverage solutions, tools and techniques being developed across Agriculture Research, reducing duplication and providing access to additional whole of agriculture funds.

This project looked at implementing timely exchange of pre-fishing information, quota accounting data and product (catch) data from Department of Primary Industries and Regional (DPIRD) to fishers and GFC Processors in a secure and permissioned manner.

Objectives

The objective of this experiment was to demonstrate the timely flow and exchange of pre-fishing information, quota accounting data, and product (catch) data from WA DPIRD to Fishers and Processors in a secure and permissioned manner to enable better logistics planning. Likewise, data from Fishers and Processors to WA DPIRD in a secure and permissioned manner to enable timely quota consumption accounting by WA DPIRD, and to demonstrate the viability of end-to-end product traceability.

Key findings

Current Telstra/IBM integration of in-production capabilities into a Supply Chain Data Exchange providing secure permissioned sharing of standardised data by data owners was used to deliver value propositions for this experiment. The resultant Quota Accounting, Pre-fishing Logistics Planning, and Provenance and Traceability applications addressed initial frictions and surfaced further opportunities enabled by de-centralised data storage, and data management.
The key finding was that all experiment participants had a desire to adopt the solution proposed and saw value in doing so.

Benefits to industry

The benefits from this multi-phase program of work seeks to create a data highway for obtaining data for decision making, and improving the functionality and analytical potential of data, ultimately leading to valuable time saving realisations not only within the red meat industry but across the Australian agrifood sector.

So far, the Australian Agrifood Data Exchange has highlighted some practical ways the program will seek to benefit the agricultural industry.

This includes:

- Centralising data (e.g., certifications) to ensure compliance with industry requirements can be proven and fast checked in an easy manner
- Merging data sources to enable the source of any contamination or the presence of pests to be rapidly identified
- Enabling the benchmarking of data to be shared with any required parties in the industry for comparison and decision making
- Providing data to illustrate the journey of the produce from the producer to the consumer, including details from each point in the supply chain (e.g., the product’s certifications, origins or exposure to chemicals).

MLA action

MLA/ ISC will continue to act as a lead role in the Australian Agrifood Data Exchange program into phase 3.

Future research

Phase 3 of the program will be to run experiments on each of the four agreed use cases as well as determine the operating model and governance structure for the exchange.